urshrew

Recent Actions

• Commented on Lancaster, PA: the most spied-upon town in America
  "Those who are law-abiding citizens, they don't have anything to worry about."" Its a perfect mix of self-righteousness and ignorance that allows people think that the only people who ever have anything to hide are law breakers and the evil....
• Commented on Panpsychism and Hylozoism
  takeshi Great use of appeal to authority, and obnoxious dickery, without answering how it is a mixture of supposedly unconscious material (carbon, water, nitrogen, etc) is very much conscious....
• Commented on Panpsychism and Hylozoism
  "Philosophers have had little reason to ponder the phenomenon we refer to as consciousness following the unsurprising discovery that it's the result of having a brain" What about those who are conscious and are found not to have a brain?...
• Commented on Panpsychism and Hylozoism
  At some point in time, a person has to admit that what we consider dead dumb unconscious matter (for example, a mixture of 70% water, carbon, nitrogen, iron and other elements), in a certain structure, can be conscious and aware...
• Commented on Bush cronies land jobs charging for advice on not getting eaten by the monsters they created
  You know your system no longer works when it becomes a self defeating loop. Officials make laws then pimp themselves out to organizations to find the loop holes in those very same laws, therefore, negating the value (if there was...
• Commented on RNC chairman says that gay marriage is bad for economy
  The fact that the Republican party is still hitting the gay marriage issue button long after the last tincture of narcotic has been delivered shows that they are completely out of touch. I don't like Keith Olberman's style, largely because...
• Commented on Debt-collectors and credit card companies: the psychologists of predatory lending
  Psychologists should do a study on people who create such predatory lending practices. Oh wait, They already, did....
• Commented on The End of Money and the Looting of America
  Its funny how just bringing up a critique of the sacred cow of money send people all a flutter. Money is actually currency, which is a system created by people to get something(s) done. Its value is dependent only on...
• Commented on Cannabis Industry Boom
  #48 posted by Ugly Canuck, I think I should have put my comment in tags, but you're still right. I just wanted to comment on the stupidity of trying to regulate an easily available thing. Its not like people who...
• Commented on Inventing American History
  @BRAINSPORE The whole last administration is going need a lot of whitewash to make it palatable, but I'm sure there's enough historians girding themselves for the task. I have feeling its going to be something along the lines of: "He...
• Commented on Cannabis Industry Boom
  I think the laws on marijuana are ingenious. They took a common weed and figured out a way to make people pay for it, generating a billion dollar industry for something that was originally free and easily available. Pure Genius!...
• Commented on Users asked to design their own MMO levels make up really easy games
  BTW, re-reading the last comment I made, I am reminded why there is a preview button on this site. I stand by my ideas, if not my poorly developed sentence structure....
• Commented on Users asked to design their own MMO levels make up really easy games
  Ever describe a creative project to someone you invested your heart and soul in and get a response: "Well, did you make any money off of it?" For some people, the work, in of itself, is the reward, for others,...
• Commented on Life Inc: Chapter One, part one
  Two powers seem to be at work in your narrative: the desire to expand capital laterally and the desire to funnel capital vertically to a select few....
• Commented on HOWTO lecture to students
  A lot of lecturing skills are true for all speaking skills. Involve your audience. People hate being talked at, in any social situation (I don't count online blogging and commenting, since they have too many differences), so just check in...
• Commented on WoWPod: a self-contained hut for WoW players
  Moderation? She's dead, sir. She never made out of the mid-20th century....
• Commented on Chief Army Chaplain in Afghanistan distributes local-language Bibles, orders congregation to convert locals
  The military did the right thing by confiscating the religious text and investigating the incident. These guys are endangering their fellow soldiers by potentially inciting an occupied population, who is mostly composed of completely different religion then theirs....
• Commented on Life Inc
  I think the problem you have is with our nature to trade long term gains for short term ones, and how often we get neither. People wanted their homes to be sold for a profit, even if it was based...
• Commented on Life Inc
  "It pays the mortgage. The Yuppie Nuremberg Defense." from Thank You For Smoking...
• Commented on Britain's secret spy-on-every-call-and-email plan already well underway
  I'm confused. Who the hell thinks that inundating their intelligence agencies with every phone call and email is going to help them pick out very specific people? Think about how many emails the average office worker sends both internally and...
• Commented on Viacom uses copyright to censor racism protest
  The decision to make a main character who is Asian in some way, not Asian in the live action movie suggests to me that the movie was made by committee and is really going to suck. "What? The main character...
• Commented on Guard your pod!
  Apparently, all pickpockets London are gigantic and all mp3 device owners are very short....
• Commented on Ragdoll Metaphysics: JG Ballard, Boredom, And The Violent Promise Of Videogames
  Other then violence, there are several other base human desires that human's supply a need for: the desire to explore, the desire for mysteries and solutions, the desire to create and design, and eventually, level and rebuild. So, the author...
• Commented on Clay Shirky Debunks the WSJ's "Bloggers For Hire" Feature
  The newest threat to America, next to swine flu: Paid Bloggers....
• Commented on Real-Money Trades: turning gold-farming into a game company profit-center
  I see, that makes sense, players are creating their own victory conditions and therefore 'winning' in their own way. What had confused me in the past was the idea of achieving a 'win' in a game as fast as possible...
• Commented on Real-Money Trades: turning gold-farming into a game company profit-center
  "In the end, all of these people engage in RMT because they don't have enough time, but they might have more disposable income." That sentence finally explained to me why people cheat at video games at all....
• Commented on Vernor Vinge predicts singularity by 2030
  #70 posted by fyngyrz Ha! You win that one FYNGYRZ. I just meant that people project themselves, and their personalities on to their visions of the unknown. Our gods, fairies and demons take the form of our various ideas. Reading...
• Commented on Teller and the neuroscience of magic
  @#16 Anonymous While I'd like to try that, explaining to the EMT/Officers/psychologist why I was running through the woods in the middle of the night with a glowing pencil taped to my hat, wouldn't be worth it. Still, a cool...
• Commented on Neuroscience of junk-food cravings, researched in a Chili's dumpster
  I just want to put into writing my immediate response to reading the ingredients in a product I have unfortunately masticated and digested before: *sob* That is all....
• Commented on Swine Influenza Update from a Nurse: Virus, Panic, Precautions, and End of the World Websites.
  Grammar stomping aside, these survivalist/rapture ready people really are just the same bunch: They're both isolationists They both think they're 'tuned in' to things we normals don't get because we're a)stupid b)lazy c)evil, all three. They're both anti-progress (they would...